Waves were now lurching my kayak left and right and I nearly tumbled twice. I paddled furiously. I found myself quite angry at the wind and the waves. At one point, I remember using my paddle to take a good whack at a wave--partially in order to steer my craft, but also because, well, I felt the wave deserved a good whack.
Category: personal
the different drummer goes against the grain
A month or two before I started the regimen, I almost returned a belt I'd just bought because it felt a bit too tight. Five months later, I've stopped wearing the belt because it no longer fits me. It's too loose.
i am a total Baha’i calendar geek
I have had a geek-fascination with the Baha'i calendar (also know as the Badi calendar) ever since rediscovering the Baha'i Faith last summer.
paper swimming pools and fear of the future
Looking back, I realize that a lot of the choices I’ve made in life have been influenced in part by worries about the future. I spent nearly seven years working for the environmental movement, and my twelve-year fundraising career was indirectly spurred by this desire to make a difference.
paper swimming pools
Then I’d borrow the little Playskool people from my sister’s Playskool house and have them toddle away in this pool. Step by step, I’d get them to make their way into deeper and deeper water until finally I had the Playskool people jumping off the diving boards.
five years in Madison, Wisconsin, part III
I mean, it was as if bricks and mortar were falling out of the sky in front of me and mysteriously arranging themselves into a house right at the point I desperately needed shelter. And I wouldn’t have even walked in the direction of such a miracle had it not been for a mysterious gut feeling 2 ½ years before.
five years in madison, wisconsin, part II
This left me with no time to take my extra posessions to Goodwill. Instead, a dresser, a nice coffee table, a couch, and a chair ended up in the alley. I think the dumpster divers named the alley after me.
January 3–only 78 days until spring! yay!
The holiday season lets me smile and tell myself that I'm all aglow with this "peace on earth and goodwill to all" stuff. January comes in and kisses me with a flying snowball that says, "Okay, now, what are you going to do about it?"
visions of Chicago lights dancing in my head
It's kind of significant that today is the fifth anniversary of the day I first moved to Madison. Actually there are two anniversaries--December 26th is when I first started living in Madison, and January 26th is the day I pulled up all my Illinois stakes and fully relocated myself to Madison. That's another long story which I'll tell in another month. But I promised ye gentle readers that I was going to write a little bit more about my visit to Chicago
visions of orange street lights dancing in my head
What got to me was the orange street lights. Seriously. Chicago's street lights are a weird, incandescent orange, and that made it very, well, Chicago. I have many memories of various adventures under those street lights--excursions to different parts of the city to visit family, hang out with friends, celebrate the Fourth of July or New Year's. And it was all coming back to me, even among the gritty parts of the city near the Stevenson Expressway.